How often do we get the chance to experience a really truly unfettered pleasure? I got to have mine at lunch.
Today: what a lollipop of a day, filled with all kinds of karmic repayment for yesterday. Yesterday was just a mishegoss of a day, a day that started with the death of my work computer, a creaky old laptop that had already been passed around the company when I inherited it in 2001. I never knew how much I depended on my computer - it’s not just for reading the blogs of your friends and for chatting in baking chat rooms anymore! - until I was without one. From there we proceeded on to an indifferent lunch; a doctor’s appointment that made me feel like a combination of misbehaving child and underpaid hooker; a cold and ferocious rainstorm, the kind where you think, as rain drips into your stinging eyes, “oh, so that’s what they mean by nor’easter”; a soup for dinner made from chicken broth, gnocchi and pecorino toscano, so sexy in the conception but so underwhelming in the execution; and an unpleasant discovery that the New York State Department of Revenue is late in mailing tax return forms because it is adding a line requiring all residents to estimate how many purchases they made online or out-of-state in 2003; if you didn’t pay any New York state tax on this stuff, time to ante up, suckers!
By noon today, the rain had dried up, the skies were crisp and blue and the temperature had hit 45 degrees. Since I am still recovering from last week’s vicious head cold - hey, 99% better is still “recovering,” ta very much - I felt completely justified in bypassing my lunchtime workout and heading down to the Greenmarket. (Yes, yes, normally I am suspicious of a warm day in February, but I already know that we’re going back into the 20’s on Sunday, so today I can enjoy the weather, which, really, is still too cold for spring.) Even though the pickings at the market in February pale in comparison to those in August, a body can still feed itself well on them. There are stands where you can buy rabbit and ostrich meat. You can get eggs, bread and milk, so you can be prepared for blizzards. (evil grin) You can get terrific storage-friendly root vegetables, twelve kinds o’taters, and Savoy cabbages pretty enough to put fractals to shame. Best of all, you can still get apples.
Years ago I wrote an essay about apples for foodies.com. It has long since been archived, but go check out the site anyway. (If you like what you see, be sure to let Joy, the site owner/sysadmin/food goddess, know. Tell her that Jen sent you.) At the time I’d written it, I had just read Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk and Some Recipes From a Guy in the Kitchen by Jack Butler, and as much as I love Jack and respect his palate, I could not let lie unchallenged his assertion that apples were too straightforward and sincere to be really desirable eating. He is more of a peach guy, prone to raptures over a sun-warmed peach fresh off the tree. Far be it from me to gainsay the very real pleasures of biting into a tree-ripened peach, spraying juice all over your chin, hands and shirt, but I take exception to the idea that apples wear their charms too plainly for enchantment. They can be straightforward and sincere. They can also be mysterious, brash, complex, resonant, deep, nuanced and, if you get the right varietal, sexy enough to make even a peach-fancier blush.
From the first brisk days of fall to the pre-rhubarb days of April, I buy a lot of apples. I usually go through a run of pie-baking and jelly-making; occasionally I’ll throw some halved apples into the roasting dish with the ubiquitous chicken; at least once I’ll make roasted or braised pork and cabbage with apples; I’ll do at least two batches of apple butter, one dark, one light. I’ll talk a big game about tarte tatin or caramel-baked apples, but more often than not, Lloyd and I end up eating them out of hand, and then I have to go buy more. One of my favorite things to make is the magnificent Twenty-Hour Apples from Desserts By Pierre Herme, by Pierre Herme and Dorie Greenspan, in which you slice apples paper-thin, toss them with butter and sugar (the recipe also calls for orange zest, but I find the flavor of orange invasive in this dish, so sometimes I’ll omit it entirely, or substitute a vanilla bean), wrap the roasting dish in plastic wrap, weight everything down with a plate and roast the apples in a just-barely warm oven (175 Fahrenheit) for ten hours. Take them out of the oven and throw them in the fridge, still weighted down, for another ten hours. If you resist the temptation to shave any time from the baking or chilling times, you will be rewarded with a deeply buttery, candied, collapsing little pile of apples, suitable for topping with whipped cream or plain yogurt, or for mixing into ice cream, or for turning into a tart, maybe with a cinnamon pate sablee shell and a pastry cream flavored with sauternes. You can also just grab a fork and eat them in situ from the fridge. I usually dispense with the fork and curl them around my fingers.
If you are lucky enough to live near an orchard or to buy your apples from a farmer’s market, you will be surprised and charmed by the varietals still available, and the evocative names for them: Cortland, Ida Red, Paula Red, Rome Beauty, Stayman, Winesap, Stayman-Winesap, Empire, Black Twig, Opalescent, Baldwin, Rhode Island Greening, Mutsu, Esopus Spitzenberg. For about four weeks in September, the stand from which I buy my apples has a small crop of Cox’s Orange Pippins, a grand old British varietal that turns up often in British cookbooks. I love them like mad, and I tend to buy them in quantity, leaving almost none for the other shoppers at the market. They are so good that I don’t feel guilty about doing this, as I normally would. For my non-Cox’s buying sprees, I tend to favor the Winesap, near-perfect in pies and even better eaten out of hand. Lloyd is a fan of Opalescents and Baldwins, two more varietals that straddle the cooking/eating divide admirably.
This is all well and good, Jen, but what did you buy today? Why, thank you for asking. 
I took a pass around the stand, could not find any Winesaps, decided to get some Black Twigs instead. Maybe some Cortlands, too. As I was about to give my bags to Lucas, the greatest apple seller the Union Square Greenmarket has ever known, I heard him pointing out the bin of Winesaps to another customer. Oh, no, can’t leave without some Winesaps! By the time I was done, I had well over 12 pounds of apples, for which Lucas charged me only a fraction of what they were worth. Did I mention that Lucas is the king of apple sellers, and he treats good customers like gold?
Those apples sat on my desk, bags half-opened, for three hours this afternoon. By the time it was time to leave for the day, I thought I would go out of my mind with desire. Oh, the way these apples smell. The Black Twigs are tart and bright, and smell of the cider they could eventually be pressed into. The Cortlands are sweet, and smell vaguely of leaves and blossoms. The Winesaps, forever and always my favorites, they smell of earth, wine, cold cellars, lying on wet grass, mystery. I can’t stop myself. I pull out one of the more oversized of the Winesaps, almost the size of a Red Delicious, large for this varietal. It snaps, then gives, against my front teeth. The flesh is a little softer than it is at the height of season, but it still provides plenty of the resistance that makes apples so satisfying to eat out of hand. The juice is both tart and sweet, apple wine, and there is plenty of it. It is tart and zippy, smooth and piercing, cidery, winy, round and gorgeous, here baby, there mama, everywhere daddy daddy. How could anyone consider this too straightforward and sincere to be a real pleasure?